skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both are generalisations. Besides, Apple was simply the first to do some of these things, or the first to do it well. But many were inevitable.
Do you own what you buy?
Yay, we get a Halley's now!

The real thing was big disappointment.

On the down side, look for big trouble in China - they think it's regime change time when this sort of thing happens and the article says there will be TWO bright comets in 2013, one in March one in November.
I think this article makes a really really bad comparison. With both Ruby and PHP, there are many ways to write something terrible (especially with Ruby's more than one way to do one thing Perl philosophy). However with Rails being an opinionated framework, there is typically one really publicized opinionated way to do one thing (ala Python style). With the opinion coming from good developers, I don't see quality going down anytime soon if newbies just follow it. To add to this, a lot of good ruby coders tend to do educational blog posts, which really helps out the community. Compared to the other language communities I've experienced (python, java, perl, and php), I think Ruby does the best on the education front. For now, it's what gives the language its edge.
Brightness published for this comet in the article is in "magnitude" and it's a logarithmic value of total brightness as used in astronomy. Not brightness per unit area.
Come on Universe, show us something unusually spectacular. A once in a lifetime, awe inspiring event. Something wondrous to let people for a moment see just how amazing everything around them is.

Honestly, I'm really hoping this comet hits closer to the fantastic side of the predictions. Also hoping to be able to see it from the eastern US. It says Northern Hemisphere observers are favored, so there's even more hope.
Uhh... can't you already do this with the "Send Dialog" method? https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/send/
I think you mean B&H?
It's really a little from column A, a little from column B. I'm a huge Android guy right now, and that Samsung lawsuit annoyed me to no end, but I still watched that video straight through and even sat in a bit of silence at the end. Even I can recognize what Steve and Apple have done, and what America and the world has lost in his dying early.
I don't think it's necessary to actively quell increased entrepreneurship. If these "starstruck entrepreneurs" really don't have the chops to survive in the market, they wont. Also I think one great benefit is that this increased celebritization isn't just of entrepreneurship in general, which has been popular long as anyone can remember a guy striking it rich with his own company, but technology entrepreneurship. It's encouraging more and more bright youth to pursue careers in technology and engineering; finally, programmers are receiving due respect, and as a result we're getting stronger and brighter young talent in the industry that would have otherwise pursued more popularly rewarding career paths.
GitHub Training Page
This article seems to be making a claim for KISS.

Awesome, I agree, except that all of those examples are shit.

It's not "more simple" to just walk up to your car and have it magically unlock based on proximity. Simple is using your damn key to unlock the car, not layering stacks of abstractions in order to compute ones location juxtaposed to a vehicle. In fact, that order of events should have gone something like this (as a generic, modern day implementation of this functionality):

- owner approaches car

- owner's keyfob transmits signal to car

- owner's car polls for incoming signal

- owner's car decrypts keyfob signal

- owner's car verifies that the keyfob has a legitimate encrypted key for that vehicle

- owner's vehicle signals the locking routine in the ECU

- owner's ecu flips solenoid for only the drivers side door

- door unlocks

- owner enters vehicle

How the hell is this more simple than:

- owner approaches car

- owner unlocks door with key

- owner enters vehicle.

Likewise, having your payments automagically charged based on location is NOT more simple. Simple is ordering your food and handing over money at the register.

The best interface is a simple interface, not a whole bunch of programming voodoo to achieve a simple task.
I wish I had the tools and space to do stuff like this.
Github Training Page
Thanks! Emulators are pretty tricky to learn, especially if you've never written one before. Between http://emu-docs.org/?page=NES and http://nesdev.com/ you'll find all the information needed.

If you look in the video and controller code you'll see that Go makes handling the concurrency there very easy. It also made testing really simple to add in without a ton of effort. Couple that with the fact that it's super clean and runs really fast on every machine I've tried on, it's held up pretty well for this type of project.
A moving tribute and wonderful video in and of itself. I'm far too young (21) to fully appreciate everything he embodied. His early death really makes you appreciate the luck of being alive. From the normal to the billionaire magicians, remember this:

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time." - Mark Twain
Kim Dotcom’s Gaming Lag Hints at New Spying Controversy
"Why would you test if someone can reverse a string if you're hiring someone to maintain and build on some shitty web app?"

If that question can't be answered then your opinion on someones skill level is irrelevant. Also, if you've got time, answer the questions in my first post:

"How old are you? Have you hired developers before? Truthfully, have you ever had to reverse a string under pressure at your current job."
Mike wrote a document (the challege), and offered a $5000 bug bounty. Patrick found a bug, Mike should have paid up and fixed the bug in the spec, just like Knuth pays for typos and Google pays for security bug reports.
Per capita, I doubt it. We have a lot more avenues to escape this kind of stuff now, and politics was much more of a concern of folks back then.
That's strange since it's in the top 10 with votes.
I was in a hospital the other day with my wife. I watched a senior consultant try and find a printer in AD (because the one on his desk was broken). This was to print a request form. It was very hard for him. The form exists because they have two systems with a paper integration path between them. There is some ceremony involved as well, because there is a quota on how many outstanding forms they can be processing. There is also a restriction on when the appointment can be made resulting in a weird set of rules which are virtually impossible to deal with effectively. The staff are completely depressed at having to deal with this every day.

Instead of wasting more money on this shitty PR exercise, perhaps they should fire Kelsey and all quango-esque departments and middle management who bought this, fire the outsourced idiots who built pieces of crap like this and hire a software team (google style!!!) to build new software and infrastructure across the entire NHS from scratch on Open Source software.

The amount of money the NHS pisses up the wall on contractors and management could build a country-wide system from scratch which solves all of these issues. I mean firing five management consultants could hire people to build an open source active directory replacement which would save millions in license costs (OpenLDAP doesn't cut it so don't go there). Another five management consultants would create a standard desktop operating system country-wide based on a COTS Linux distribution. Another 20 management consultants would replace a big chunk of the 105-or-so disjoint software platforms.

In the mean time, they could surely afford some training for their staff, to fix a few printers and to clean up poor integration paths like this. Then we might get to see our consultants rather than watch them argue with Active Directory.

Note: I've worked for the NHS before - it's an IT disaster, bar Guys & St Thomas trust which actually have a clue stick.
Don’t Look to Tech Startups to Fill the Jobs Gap
Amazing how drawing two biased samples from a population can result in differing observations!
The video is the only content on the page. If you don't have your system configured to play video (user error), why would you expect a fallback?

There is, in fact, a little "X" that loads in the top left. http://elsewhe.re/Jwtz
Steve Jobs = Nostradamus (1983)
Anybody remember Kohoutek? Exactly. If I were a comet, my strategy would be to underpromise and overdeliver. That's the best way to rally a comet's soothsayer base.
Well, I don't think it's the most fitting tribute to Jobs. It sounds more like an Apple commercial. Granted, Apple is the sum of his life's work. But a tribute to someone should be more than that person explaining the greatness of Apple, it should be someone explaining the greatness of Jobs, IMHO.
Absolutely, I always refer to coding as 'creative logic'. :) The Art of Happiness At Work by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler is a great book. It talks about flow/being in the zone and after reading about that, I've really felt lucky to have experienced that mode of pure focus and true moment oriented existence.

I was never a person that stayed up all night coding, though. I'm a morning person and my body/mind were always like "no way". But, that being said, I have woken up many times at 3 or 4 and cranked all the way through until 7 or 8 that night. So I think it just depends on your natural biorhythms.

I'm not 50 yet, but already am finding it harder and harder to get a 'good day' of coding in with a wife and 8mo old son. Besides distractions galore, my next big loss is sleep. I definitely feel that side and I'm even having a hard time sometimes remembering things in conversation. I think of it as not having my ECC ram. :)

However, like many other postings, I will probably code until I die or until I just can't understand anything anymore. Then I'll probably just back to my 8-bit machines and assembly; the days when things were simpler. The quintessential old man out of step. Heh.
rm -rf doesn't follow symlinks:

/tmp $ mkdir -p a/b/c
/tmp $ mkdir -p a/d/e
/tmp $ cd a/b/c
/tmp/a/b/c $ ln -s /tmp/a/d .
/tmp/a/b/c $ cd ../../
/tmp/a $ ls */*
b/c:
d

d/e:
/tmp/a $ rm -rf b
/tmp/a $ ls
d

It would be pretty stupid for it to.
Back at that time, or a bit earlier, many commercial software products offered "academic" licenses that were (also) sold by third parties. And in the earlier cases of this, often "validation" of eligibility consisted of demonstrating that one had a .edu email address.

So yes, people really did use email addresses as qualifiers, including for significant commercial transactions.

(Although some might argue, if you as the licensor weren't willing to setting for a .edu address as proof, you might as well settle for no-revenue piracy. And some others would argue that, licensed or pirated, initial uptake was crucial to driving further sales e.g. when such people landed in jobs where licenses were purchased -- they'd buy what they or the employees knew and were proficient with.

So, regardless of the particular rationale employed, email addresses were used as "proof".)
Linux is unlikely to be an alternative to OS X (for most users). The key is in looking at why most users decide to buy an OS X machine. Many people on here probably bought one because it provides a decent nix style OS with normal command line interface and the ability to run the things they use for development in much the same way as their Linux deployments. However, that isn't the majority of OS X users.

The majority of OS X users probably bought it because it felt more like a consumer electronic device than their Windows computer did. Apple's integration between the hardware and software means that things like trackpad drivers, sleep mode, ambient light sensors, etc. all just work nicely and smoothly. Many PC manufacturers offer features thinking that a feature is just a boolean: it has it or it doesn't have it. For example, a friend of mine has a Sony laptop with a backlit keyboard - just like my MacBook. Except that, in practice, it isn't like my MacBook. Either the light sensor is faulty or it doesn't use one, but it doesn't change the backlight brightness automatically. When you manually change the brightness, sometimes a box on the screen comes up showing you raising and lowering it and sometimes it doesn't. The same can be said for the WiFi helpers that companies seem to install to manage the WiFi: they feel cheap and poorly executed. So, for many users, a MacBook is more like buying a consumer electronic where you feel like it's been manufactured as a cohesive product a little more than the Windows environment where it feels like an OS on top of hardware with the pieces supporting hardware specific functionality created hastily and poorly.

If Intel pushes Linux as an alternative, it could help Linux along for those wishing they had a Windows with a nix development environment (which is what I think you mean when you say "alternative to OS X"). It's unlikely to create something that most OS X users would want since mainstream Linux would mean the same hastily made pieces to do hardware specific things. Even look at Android. It's great, but what does everyone complain about: the ways in which manufacturers customize it to make themselves seem different from everyone else.

--

In terms of the likelihood that Intel will do this, I think it's highly unlikely. You talk about Apple (potentially) switching to ARM and Intel losing that. However, if Intel pours money into Linux to make it a better OS than it is today, that isn't helping Intel's case. Linux can transition to ARM a lot easier than OS X can. Most Linux software is open-source meaning that even if the original maintainer is gone, someone else can recompile the software. For OS X and Windows, it would be a lot harder for them to transition processor architectures since they would need developers to do that work or provide a translation layer like Apple did moving to Intel.

Making Linux the best OS out there would only make it easier for people to leave Intel processors. With OS X and Windows, Intel has a certain amount of lock-in. It's growing smaller, but there's a lot more lock-in than with Linux.

Ultimately, Intel has to compete to make a processor that people want.
Years ago, I was an applications programmer in San Francisco working on a timesharing language called EPS. The mainframes were all in Massachusetts. (Think dial-up terminals, mainframes, and 450 BAUD being considered fast.)

EPS, an interpreted language, was designed to let financial analysts run economic projections. It contained various kinds of arrays.

One day, the systems programmers announced a new feature, first released to the test mainframe: a new structure, called containers IIRC, with the twist being that any cell in a container could itself consist of a container.

You know where this is going:

For I = 1 to 100
ContX[1] = ContX
EndFOR

10 seconds later, EPS on the test mainframe had crashed. Coincidence? Hmmmmmm.

So far, my cover was my inquiring mind. But then I ran the loop again, with the same results.

A minute later, there was Massachusetts on the phone, in the person of my friend Kevin, lead EPS developer: "Hey, the answer is 47. What the hell are you doing?"
Yeah, so you could win a different incorrectly posed challenge from the original incorrectly posed challenge.
I believe you, because that intuitively makes sense, but can anyone give me a typical real-world example where this could easily happen?

So an application, say a web application in Python using some framework, what kind of type-related coding mistakes could you make? And which ones would be subtle enough to only be caught after it's in the customer's hands? (assuming a reasonable minimum of testing before that)

I'm asking not out of disbelief, but just because I'm having a real hard time coming up with an example that makes me "yeah I'd fall for that and only realize until after I delivered".

Is it possible that maybe, just general good coding style in Python makes it so that either you don't even consider sending a `str` to a function that expects a `float`, or that if you do (something like that) it fails almost immediately with a run-time Exception, way before you think of delivering?

For most of my Python programs, once they're done, if you'd analyze them, the types sent over all code paths probably would be static :) I'd think it pretty strange if a program would suddenly call functions with different parameter types, depending on user-input, unless you actively decided that it should do so by design (like something that handles arbitrary JSON-like structures), in which case you probably intend to restrict the amount of types it will be intended to handle.

So in that sense, you end up with what is mostly a statically typed program in the end, even if written in a dynamic language, no?

One thing I do agree that if your program is written dynamically typed and intends to keep on being very dynamic about its typing even after it's done during run-time then, yes, it's probably almost impossible to make sure it does not crash or throw exceptions, given arbitrary user input. But in that case, often this is expected, and not the kind of program you'd consider an end-user application, but rather a sort of tool script thing that can indeed crash on unexpected input. Which is also useful :)

So, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd conclude that the difference is that with dynamic typing, there's less red tape during development. But a well written program intended for end users probably ends up with mostly static types de facto because otherwise it'd be fairly unpredictable. However, if you'd have used a statically typed language, you would not have to assume "well written" because the static typing brings guarantees with it.
Can someone explain this in laymen terms please? looks cool though.
It's perfect. What could be a more fitting tribute to Steve Jobs than to put an elegant facade on someone else's work?
I could actually smell this comment from five pages up.
Using data smartly in the NHS is key to making it more effiecient.

I witnessed £1 million wasted on writing a piece of software that potentially could have saved the NHS millions but due to bad management and politics was eventually cancelled.

This despite the fact that a NHS board manager had already created a similair system, himself through self taught coding in an Access database
No, but I understand why you might think that. I sent you an E-mail.
Telepresence robot helps put boy, 7, at the head of his class
I also have a Galileoscope. I find it really awesome if you use a tripod, but otherwise totally miserable. And even with the tripod...yeah, focusing is tough. But possible, and very very rewarding for a $15 scope.
What was your conclusion? (Looking at the source code of the page, foundation?)
It is not KISS from the engineers perspective, but from the user perspective.
>> The best interface is a simple interface, not a whole bunch of programming voodoo to achieve a simple task.

The point is: the best interface is NO interface.
Go to car. Open door. Sit.
Not: Go to car. Find keys. Unlock. Open Door. Sit.

Ordering your food is less simple than ordering your food and handle money? But you do loose a lot of anonymity, which offsets the ease of use.
I think you're looking for a co-founder before you need one. That's not the step you need to solve right now.

Have you done anything towards your idea yet? When you start showcasing your abilities (selling, designing, writing, networking, planning) that's when it's far easier to get technical people on board, because then you sound hardworking, creative, easy to work with & thoughtful (i.e you've done what you can before you expect others to pitch in)

You need to get to a point where you have done EVERYTHING you can possibly do to prepare for the building stage. That shows a co-founder they can hit the ground running with their skills & won't have to think every tiny detail through, you've shown commitment to your own project.

Go speak to potential customers, do surveys, ask if they'll part with their money for your idea, Create a Twitter account & start to draw a following, name your startup, buy the domain, set up a Wordpress blog, draw wireframes of EVERY stage of your idea. Collect examples of designs, interactions and UI that you love.

Having pre-orders turns heads like you wouldn't believe.

If that all sounds like too much work then having a co-founder is the least of your worries.
I am looking for a solution to monitor the server room's air conditioner. I would love to use a Raspberry Pi, but I need to find an anemometer[1] for it.

1) I am going to monitor if the air conditioner is blowing and page if it is not. Paging someone earlier than the temp change does.
I disagree about the design part. This would work so much better as tabular data. Also, as someone said earlier, having to click that X to view another company's information is a pain in the ass. They also use the word "sort" when they actually mean "filter".
Here's a very simple example of compression. It explains what other people have said about using redundancy to achieve compression.

(https://sites.google.com/site/usingaiforbettercompression/)

(And then it has a few quotes from different places about why AI is linked to compression.)

(Google sites is sub-optimal, and when I've finished it I'll host it elsewhere.)

(Also, submitted it here. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4616442))

EDIT: I'll just paste it here. I need to work on language and tone, apologies for being patronising.

Imagine we have a language with just 4 letters: A, B, C, and D.	In this language the frequency probabilities are A = 0.5, B = 0.3, C = 0.15, and D = 0.05

A short sentence in this language may look something like this, after we strip out the spaces. There are 20 characters.

ACABBAABABAACBAADCAB

Now let's represent those letters with carefully chosen numerical values.

A = 0
B = 10
C = 110
D = 111

Our sentence becomes (first with spaces, and then without)

A C A B B A A B A B A A C B A A D C A B
0 110 0 10 10 0 0 10 0 10 0 0 110 10 0 0 111 110 0 10

0110010100010010001101000111110010

These values were chosen because they are unambiguous, even when you remove the spaces. You cannot turn the above collection of 1's and 0's into anything other than the correct sequence.

This uses 34 characters to represent the our sentence. But there's a further step.

We create another table.

00 = q
01 = w
10 = z
11 = x

And again we represent the sentence with the new letters.

0110010100010010001101000111110010

01 10 01 01 00 01 00 10 00 11 01 00 01 11 11 00 10
w z w w q w q z q x w q w x x q z

wzwwqwqzqxwqwxxqz

This is 17 characters. We have saved 3 characters. Obviously this isn't great, but it's just an example to demonstrate the process. You can see from this example why compressing random data can be hard. One feature of randomness is an equal distribution of each possible character. We cannot use redundancy to create our dictionary tables.
VideoPaste.us
thanks, i must be missing something then. i guess my knowledge is more remote than i think. :)
nitpick: There is no such thing as a truly random piece of data. "Truly random" is only meaningful in the limit as the file size goes to infinity. The string "000000" could be generated by a truly random process just as well as any any other.
When the only two hub categories were "serious stuff" and "fun hacks"